For more than 30 years, the German artist Isa Genzken (born 1948) has been amassing a body of work in sculpture, installation, photography, collage and film. As one of Germany’s brightest stars in the art world, she was well suited to represent her country at the Venice Biennale in 2007, an occasion which this volume commemorates. The title of this book and of her installation at the German pavilion plays with the word’s associations as a global and globally contested resource, through a series of sculptural installations invoking in particular America’s dependence on oil.

Isa Genzken’s works express an attraction to that which surrounds and shapes our everyday lives, from design, consumer goods, and the media to architecture and urban environments. Her interest lies in the way in which common aesthetic styles come to illustrate and embody political and social ideologies. Her diverse practice draws on the legacies of Constructivism and Minimalism and often involves a critical, open dialogue with Modernist architecture and contemporary visual and material culture. Using plaster, cement, building samples, photographs, and bric-a-brac, Genzken creates architectonic structures that have been described as contemporary ruins. She further incorporates mirrors and other reflective surfaces to literally draw the viewer into her work. As part of her deep-set interest in urban space, she also arranges complex, and often disquieting, installations with mannequins, dolls, photographs, and an array of found objects.